Agnostic Predication in Constructions not Explicitly Complemented
January 9th, 2008, search relatedRelated posts :: Agnostic Predication :: A Tree, A Prime Number and Axiom 2 :: A tree, a prime number and off to the races at Axiom 2 :: Absolute and Relative Predication
Agnostic Predication in Constructions not Explicitly Complemented
in a statement like ‘there is only one even prime number’, ‘there’ is
usually considered a placeholding pronoun; and, this sentence format is
often called ’subjectless’.
to analyze the meaning of such sentences in relation to the theory of
the copula, one removes the placeholder and change the word order so
that one gets:
only one even prime number is.
the statement is uttered agnostically as to the reality type of its
referent, the number 2.
do you deny that, for over 2,000 years, there has been a debate among
mathematicians as to the reality type of numbers and other mathematical
objects. are they mere phenomenological (ie conceptual) realities; or,
do they reside in some platonic heaven of ideal forms and perfect
triangles and so on?
naturally, I take no position as to which side is correct, if either;
and, thus, when I assert ‘there is only one even prime number’ I do so
agnostically.
>ME: Stupid example. ‘there is only one even prime number’ is an
>analytic statement, not a synthetic statement according to Kant’s KdrV.
focus. the point is that ‘only one even prime number is’ has the
syntactic format you have been calling ‘absolute’; but, semantically,
the statement is clearly intended agnostically.
the correlation between the syntactic form (not explicitly complemented)
and the agnostic intention generalizes to the analysis of ‘I am’.
Joe
–
Philosophy is, after all, done ultimately in the first person for the
first person. — H-N Castaneda
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http://what-am-i.net
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